News
of the death of disco diva Donna Summer broke just as I was finishing my
review copy of Pop Cult: Religion and
Popular Music, by British popular music scholar and musician Rupert
Till. Summer plays a small but not
inconsequential role in Till’s book, which argues that popular music has
established itself as the functional successor to organized religion in the
postmodern era (or as Till frequently writes, “liquid times.”) He has a nicely varied background for researching
this project, from singing in church choirs and attending Pentecostal services
to becoming a cultish teenage fan of Adam Ant before working as a “DJ, musician,
promoter and clubber” in Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC)--a scene that
Till traces to Summers’ pioneering techno music collaborations with Giorgio
Moroder that yielded such disco anthems as “Love to Love You Baby” and “I Feel
Love.”

Perhaps because it’s the scene he knows best, Till finds in electronic
dance music the strongest support for his thesis that pop music cults are
actually fertile New Religious Movements for youth turned off by traditional
faiths:

“EDMC spirituality involves
many elements including the creation of sacred spaces; the emulation of images
of heaven using clouds of smoke and moving lights; out of body, otherworldly
experiences; opposition and transgression; subcultural authority and
authenticity; ecstatic journeys; ritual possession trance practices triggered
by dancing, drugs and music; no reference to an external deity that has an
absolute right to obedience; and the replacement of priests by DJs, drug
dealers and promoters whose jobs are to facilitate and enhance the mystical
experiences of clubbers.” (162)

The book develops its argument through a broad-brush
overview of British and American postwar popular music, with chapters on sex,
drug cults, pop stars as cultural icons, the emergence of virtual bands, death
cults, and the importance of locality in music scenes. Along the way he touches down for more
extended discussions of the Beatles, Madonna, Prince, cock rock, Britpop, death
metal, and Gorillaz (no mention of hip-hop).
Much of Till’s material will be familiar to anyone with a passing
knowledge of rock’n’roll history. I
frequently felt bogged down by anecdotes and excessive block quotations, a
meandering and redundant structure of argument.
(Not to mention more comma splices than I’ve seen in any published
work.) Till seems to have a hard time
knowing when he’s written enough to establish a particular claim.

And he’s missed the musical transformation of evangelical
Christianity. “The Christian church is
so culturally out of touch with the rest of popular culture and society in the
West,” he writes, “that it still considers hymns that are relics of Victorian
religious practice, in some way significant, and the leaders of such religious
groups seem to prefer that their church die than keep in touch with
contemporary culture.” (169) This may be true of England but certainly not the
States.

Back to Summer: Not surprisingly, she first learned to sing
as a girl in church (she grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston) and,
maybe less widely known, crowned her towering dominance of the disco era by
becoming a born-again Christian in 1979, just about the same time as Bob Dylan.